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Spatial and feature-based attention to expressive faces

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Abstract

Facial emotion is an important cue for deciding whether an individual is potentially helpful or harmful. However, facial expressions are inherently ambiguous and observers typically employ other cues to categorize emotion expressed on the face, such as race, sex, and context. Here, we explored the effect of increasing or reducing different types of uncertainty associated with a facial expression that is to be categorized. On each trial, observers responded according to the emotion and location of a peripherally presented face stimulus and were provided with either: (1) no information about the upcoming face; (2) its location; (3) its expressed emotion; or (4) both its location and emotion. While cueing emotion or location resulted in faster response times than cueing unpredictive information, cueing face emotion alone resulted in faster responses than cueing face location alone. Moreover, cueing both stimulus location and emotion resulted in a superadditive reduction of response times compared with cueing location or emotion alone, suggesting that feature-based attention to emotion and spatially selective attention interact to facilitate perception of face stimuli. While categorization of facial expressions was significantly affected by stable identity cues (sex and race) in the face, we found that these interactions were eliminated when uncertainty about facial expression, but not spatial uncertainty about stimulus location, was reduced by predictive cueing. This demonstrates that feature-based attention to facial expression greatly attenuates the need to rely on stable identity cues to interpret facial emotion.

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Notes

  1. Because 4.3% of trials were ‘catch’ trials to make sure subjects evaluated each stimulus before responding, the probability of e.g. happy face appearing on the left as cued was less than 1, the S-R uncertainty in this case is slightly higher than 0 bits.

  2. Observers still had to verify the stimulus matched the cue, as a small percentage (4.3%) of trials were catch trials to minimize guessing.

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Acknowledgements

Funding for this research was provided by R01 MH101194 to K.K. and R.B.A.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA

    Kestutis Kveraga & Hee Yeon Im

  2. Department of Radiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    Kestutis Kveraga & Hee Yeon Im

  3. Department of Psychology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA

    David De Vito

  4. Department of Psychology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Cody Cushing

  5. Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Daniel N. Albohn & Reginald B. Adams Jr.

  6. Department of Radiology, Harvard Medical School, Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Room 2301, 149 13th Street, Charlestown, MA, 02129, USA

    Kestutis Kveraga

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  1. Kestutis Kveraga
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Kveraga, K., De Vito, D., Cushing, C. et al. Spatial and feature-based attention to expressive faces. Exp Brain Res 237, 967–975 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-019-05472-8

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